BASC50028 - William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury and Absalom Absalom!

Course Description

The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are two of Faulkner's best known works - and perhaps his greatest. They are a superb place to begin - or to revisit – Faulkner and his wondrous, living creation of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. In 1929’s The Sound and the Fury, the erstwhile-aristocratic Compson family and the family of bedrock Dilsey which sustains them are intertwined in love and hate, need, gift, dependency - as commandingly as in life. The parents Jason and Caroline Bascomb Compson and their children Benjy, Quentin, Caddy and Jason IV's relation is complex, elusive, revelatory, fraught. The depths of the human bindings and the spectacular ways of Faulkner’s conveying them will intrigue and awe. The later-written Absalom, Absalom! (1936), set before, in and after the Civil War, retroactively haunts the earlier novel. It creates an agonizing, tremendous back-history as Quentin is seized into the mystery of Thomas Sutpen’s family in the summer and winter of 1909 – 10, unfolding in Jefferson, Mississippi and a freezing Harvard dorm room. We discover / compose, with Quentin and his roommate Shreve MacKenzie, monstrosities, heart-wrenchings and humanness as they try to plumb Sutpen, (“the demon’s”) drive to create a dynastic family – which he destroys as surely in as a Greek tragedy.  Each work is a masterpiece of love, pain, wonder, fascination – in meaning and in expression.

Notes

A passionate warning / request: PLEASE do not read any chronology of the stories or characters’ “biography” descriptions that are included with some editions. The “mystery” and agony / pleasure of our discovering as we go – along with the characters’ discovering - is critically essential to the experience of both these works.

Required Texts:

The Sound and the Fury. (New York: Vintage Random, 1990) ISBN 978-0679732242

Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage Random, 1990) ISBN 978-0679732181